It was a fun project, and I had lots of help from an eager pair of hands. I poured little blobs of various colored paints – mostly shades of gold, raspberry and navy – in a tray, and Weston and I just smeared it all over the canvas with foam brushes. It’s hard to mess this step up!
I played around with adding more water to the paint too, which is how I ended up with that drippy spot in the top left corner above. It’s no big deal: acrylics are very forgiving, and if you don’t love a certain spot it’s easy to change it. Plus, it’ll mostly be covered with white later anyway. No need to panic.

After both canvases were painted, I grabbed a can of gold metallic spray paint and added some shiny speckled parts. It’s hard to tell in the pics, but they’re there. (In retrospect, I wish I’d made it blingier.) Here’s how the canvases looked at that point. (You can see that I’d started adding the green Frog Tape squares before I realized I’d forgotten to take a picture.)
Next, I cut pieces of FrogTape into rectangles. I wanted the rectangles to be a little wider than the FrogTape that I had on hand – and wider than the rectangles in the inspiration art – so I put two pieces of tape side by side to make the rectangles almost double width. Then, I planted my sweet little bum right in front of the television and immersed myself in some brain-melting entertainment while I covered the canvas in those rectangular tape pieces in a herringbone pattern. Make sure the edges of the tape are sealed well! I ran a fingernail over the edges to make sure they were stuck tight.
(I didn’t do any measuring, just a lot of eye-balling, because I like it imperfect I have no patience for petty “measurements” and “numbers.”)

Once it was all taped off, I removed a couple of the squares so the canvas would have some white spots, like the original. Then I regretted removing them. Then I decided it would be better without them. Then I waffled back and forth a bunch and just decided to go forth and paint.
Using a foam roller, or whatever, cover the entire piece in white paint. NOW you can freak out.
Now slooooowly, carefully, peel off the FrogTape. I did this while the paint was still pretty wet, hence the white fingers.
Oh man are those crisp lines beautiful or what?!

Once you’ve pulled off all the little tape squares, pat yourself on the back: you are a real arTISTE! Bonafide. You are Van Gogh. (Or maybe that’s just your two-year-old.)

(I made this art to hang in the office, but I’m not quite sure if it’ll live there yet… more to come!)

What I love about this project is that you can customize it for your space. Use colors that will work in your room; make it as crazy or as calm as you’d like. Let your little imagination run wild with the acrylics before you add on the tape. Let your two-year-old play with acrylics!

(P.S.: Letting Weston play with acrylics was an awesome idea, until he accidentally set his entire hand in a gob of paint, then wiped it off on his shirt. Still.)

It’s a great, inexpensive way to make your own large-scale art, and bonus: it’s totally fun, promise. Especially if you shun measurements.

Have you played with paints recently? Ever been crazy enough to give a preschooler free reign with acrylics?

I love the end result of this piece and the best part is that you did it with Weston. How cool is that? I love the pop and variations of color. Too cool! Thanks for sharing…I think I need to do this with my kiddos soon!

This is a wonderful project. It turned out absolutely awesome. My mind is running away with me as to how you can do different things with the background. I’m thinking of painting free form (imperfect) flowers all over it. before putting the tape down. And, how cool it would be to use different shaped tape pieces. Oh this is a must try! Thanks for the inspiration.

I love, love, LOVE this! I’ve always thought that inspiration piece was cool too, but I sort of overlooked it because I wasn’t a huge fan of the colors…but seeing your piece with the perfectly imperfect herringbone pattern and pretty color scheme I’m finding myself itching to make one of these myself! Thanks so much for sharing!

WOW, I am obsessed with this! It seriously looks amazing. I’ve been wanting to try my hand at painting a large piece and this just pushed me to finally do it!! I feel so inspired And I love that you let your son play with the paints too! xx Melissa

[…] hope of being able to use them one day. They have been sitting for over a year and then I found this tutorial and I knew exactly what to do with them. Art IS therapy…and I got a good dose of it doing this […]

[…] my mom painted for me: But otherwise, it’s all been DIY art, like my quote canvas and my herringbone art canvas: But I just got some fancy-schmancy new REAL art to add to my walls! Framed in a pretty frame! […]

[…] acrylic paint all over a canvas. Except instead of using a new canvas, I used this one from my DIY herringbone art project. Not that I hated that piece or wanted to destroy it, but it was the only large canvas I had on […]

Hi, I'm Kelly. Glad you're here! This little blog is where I chronicle our efforts to fix up our beaten-down home on a tiny budget. We're not there yet, but here's a peek at the view along the way... (more)